Learn more about the science of determination.

But the price you pay is thinking. And not many people want to do that. If you will do it, if you will take the time and think, you can probably achieve more than you’ve ever dreamed.

What do I mean by “thinking?” I mean asking yourself a good question and not stopping as soon as you’ve found an acceptable answer. Ask yourself a good question and keep asking. Pondering a good question can completely change your life. Let’s look at an example.

William Wells Brown was a slave in the early 1800s, but he had decided to emancipate himself. The first time he escaped, he went with his mother, heading for the Canadian border, but they were caught. As a punishment, his mother was sold to a cruel plantation owner, and Brown never saw her again.

When he finally successfully escaped in 1834, he got a job. This was the first time he was ever paid for work he did, and he was paid 25 cents. This was a monumental event for Brown. With the 25 cents in his hand, he was faced with the first decision of this kind he had ever made in his life. He didn’t know what to spend it on. He carried it for days thinking about it, wondering what he should spend his money on.

His decision, when he finally made it, was a good one. And it was so good because he took his time and really thought about it.

He decided to spend his 25 cents learning to read and write. He bought a spelling book for 15 cents and bought 10 cents worth of candy to bribe kids to teach him.

The simplicity and beauty of this decision is impressive. And his plan worked. Brown ultimately became very literate and well-read, and made it his mission in life to end the institution of slavery.

He went to Europe and gave almost a thousand lectures on the evils of slavery. He wrote newspaper articles and became the first African American to write a travel book, a novel, a play, and a history book.

When he returned from Europe, he spoke passionately and eloquently in the United States about slavery, right up until the Civil War broke out in 1860.

And he was able to do all this because he was literate.

And he was literate because he really thought about what he wanted to do with that 25 cents.

It pays to take the time to think. Ponder a question for days, even weeks or months. Don’t give up if you don’t get any good answers. Don’t settle for only okay answers. Keep thinking until you come up with something really good. It might pay off for the rest of your life.

Read more about the power of asking a good question.

Read a list of suggested questions to ponder.

A good way to use the power of asking a question is ask it on paper and then make a list of answers. Ask the question and keep writing down answers. Set some kind of target — 100 answers, for example — and don’t stop until you hit the target.

I think you’ll be surprised at some of the things you come up with, and probably surprised at how creative you really are.

Or set a timer for a period of time, say an hour, and keep coming up with answers until the timer beeps. Pick one question, set your alarm, and jot down as many answers to the question as you can in that time. Don’t monitor your answers or judge them (yet). Just try to answer the question as creatively as you can.

The first few answers will be normal, predictable answers. But then you’ll run out of those, and your creativity will have to kick in.

When your time is up, go through and pick the best answers.

A freeform question-and-answer session can be productive too. By “freeform” I mean to ask whatever question comes up for you, and then answer it to the best of your ability. Then see what question comes up for you next, and then answer that one.

For example, this little freeform dialog happened when my first book was published and I was trying to get it for sale in bookstores. I hit several setbacks in a row and I was feeling dishearted. Yet the written dialog I had with myself lifted me out of my depressed state within minutes. I felt strong and determined afterwards. My fighting spirit had returned.

Q: Why do I feel sad and defeated?

A: It seems like all I do is stick my neck out, then people are mean to me, and then I feel like a loser.

Q: Why do I want to promote this book?

A: I want Klassy proud of me. I want to make a difference with my life. I want to sell lots of books. I want to make money.

Q: Would I be willing to gain those things if I had to pay for it by sticking my neck out, having some people be mean to me, and occasionally feeling like a loser?

A: Yes. Absolutely.

In that short time, I suddenly felt determined. My motivation came back. I remembered that every person I admired had experienced similar trials and hardships, and my line of questioning cast my setbacks in a new, more noble context.

The primary way of asking questions is to create a good question and then have it on your mind for several days or weeks, pondering it in your spare time. It’s a good way to direct your mind, motivate yourself, increase your determination, and make lasting changes.

But the two variations I mention in this article can work more quickly. Either ask a question and challenge yourself to make a list of answers, or use a freeform question-and-answer technique. Any questions?

A woman (Vivian) wrote to me and told me she had trouble sleeping. She had four kids and she was worried some day she would commit suicide. I was telling her about this principle of asking questions, and she tried it the very next night. But the question she pondered all night was, “why do I think I’m destined for suicide?”

Vivian said, “I was up all night answering myself! I thought of answer after answer. The list went on and on, each answer breeding more questions of its own.”

I told her that generally “how” questions work much better than “why” questions. She had been suffering from insomnia for a long time. But the very next night after she learned about the difference between “why” questions and “how” questions, she asked herself, “How can I prevent myself from ending up a suicide?” and she thought of so many good answers so quickly, she relaxed and fell asleep and slept longer than she had in a very long time.

The next day I told her about studies on suicide showing that people with suicidal thoughts who don’t commit suicide had a reason to live. That almost sounds so obvious, it seems almost ridiculous someone had to do an experiment to prove it. The reasons people had varied quite a bit. Some people didn’t kill themselves only because it would be too painful for their sister, or it was against their religion, or they had some purpose they wanted to fulfill. But the difference between those who stayed alive and those who killed themselves was simple: The people who had a reason to live did not kill themselves.

The next day, Vivian was thinking about that study and she realized she really wanted to see her boys grow up. She had four sons, the oldest was 13. She said, “I have thought before that I’m here because they need me, but it felt like an obligation. But I’ve realized I really want to see my sons grow up to be old men.”

That is a powerful realization. I’m sure you can easily grasp the tremendous difference in motivation, determination, and power between an obligation and a genuine, sincere, deeply-felt desire.

So she had a goal, and the thought was on her mind for a few days, when she told me, “I like to watch them and think about them ‘then’ and ‘now’ and now I wonder what they’ll be like when they’re older. It’s a surprise I don’t want to miss. This very thought has been in my mind the past couple of days…’it’s a surprise I don’t want to miss.’ It’s exciting and motivating.”

I hadn’t told her about slotras, but she spontaneously was using one, wasn’t she? It encapsulated her purpose, her meaning for her life, and it was forward-looking. And the slotra directly counters the thought of suicide, doesn’t it? She’ll miss the surprise if she kills herself. It’s a question that can’t be answered by herself. She has to stay alive to see the answer. Brilliant, really.

She was already asking questions without realizing it. We all are. She started doing it deliberately and stopped asking herself “why” questions and it totally changed the direction and tone of her life. It can work the same magic for you if you would only start using it. Why not start today? Wait, change that to: “How can you start today?”

1. What am I grateful for?

2. If I was happy about this, what would I be thinking about it?

3. What did I do right today?

4. What CAN I change?

5. Does this help my goal?

6. What does life expect from me?

7. How can I prevent this from ever happening again?

8. What is the best use of my time right now?

9. How can I use this to accomplish my goal?

10. What’s good about this?

11. What is my goal here?

12. What is another way to look at this?

13. What else?

14. What memory makes me feel good?

15. Ask questions to find out more about the situation.

16. What if it really happened?

17. What abilities do I have? What am I good at?

18. What is one healthy thing I could do today to feel better?

19. What needs to be done next?

20. What good have I been ignoring?

21. How can I look at this as a good thing?

22. What could I do to make some progress on my goal?

23. Could I just do part of it for now?

24. What would be a more reasonable explanation?

25. What emotion am I aiming for?

But cheerfulness and enthusiasm are not the only two positive or worthwhile emotions. Many other emotions are superior, especially around other people. It can be annoying for other people when you are acting cheerful and enthusiastic when they don’t feel that way at all. Especially if they suspect you’re faking it.

But nobody would be annoyed if you were cultivating the feeling of affection or kindness. Those are also positive emotions. And they focus your attention outside yourself.

Another good emotion to aim for is calmness. Another is a feeling of determination.

Once you know what emotion you’re trying to cultivate, it will influence what you do. When you’re aiming for calmness, for example, you will probably change your posture a little, and maybe change the way you breathe. You might take deep breaths more often. You’ll speak differently. Trying to cultivate calmness might change the way you’re thinking and the way you treat people. And the result will be: You’ll feel more calm and relaxed. Whatever emotion you cultivate influences you.

Most of us want to be “a more positive person.” And that’s admirable. It would make the world a better place. It would make us personally happier. But let’s do it in a way that feels good inside. And let’s do it in a way that helps others feel good too.

Think about the possible positive emotions, and choose to cultivate the ones you really like. W. Clement Stone liked enthusiasm and showed us how to cultivate it. Napoleon Hill liked cheerfulness and showed us how to cultivate it. What emotions do you like?

Some of your explanations are good, some will make you feel bad unnecessarily, and some will make you less capable of dealing with the setback successfully.

The main technique in the antivirus for the mind is to look at your explanation and see if you’ve made any thought-mistakes.

If you then find mistakes in your explanation, you will naturally form new explanations of the setback. The question for today (What would be a more reasonable explanation?) goes straight to the task of creating a new explanation. You can use the question as a sort of shortcut to the antivirus for the mind once you’ve trained yourself to detect mistakes in your explanations. You can also use this question if you don’t have time to look for mistakes and want a quick and dirty method. After a setback occurs, notice the explanation you automatically made for it, and then ask yourself what would be a more reasonable explanation.

For example, let’s say you have a goal to make ten thousand dollars this month but by the end of the month, you didn’t achieve your goal. This is a failure, and you will explain it automatically. Let’s say you explain it like this: “The economy isn’t doing very well right now.”

But then you use today’s question. You ask yourself, “Is there a more reasonable explanation?” Not that there is anything horribly wrong with your first explanation. It’s that not bad. It takes the blame off yourself, so it will keep you from feeling too bad about it. But on the other hand, the explanation leaves you somewhat powerless. It doesn’t give you any avenue for finding a way to make ten thousand dollars when the economy is doing poorly, which leaves you somewhat helpless in the face of forces outside yourself.

So you try to think of another explanation. “I didn’t do all I planned on doing. That’s why I didn’t make the ten thousand dollars.” This explanation gives you an avenue to pursue that might actually lead to you achieving your goal next month regardless of what the economy is doing.

It’s always good to come up with more than one alternative explanation and then choose the best one. So you try again. “I wasted a lot of time on the least profitable part of my business. If I eliminated that part of my business, I would have more time for the more profitable things.” Again, this could lead to actions that might make you more capable of hitting your goal next month.

Every failure is probably influenced by many different factors. Trying to come up with alternative explanations opens your mind to factors in your power to control, and that not only makes you feel better, it makes you more capable of changing things in the future.

If an event happens and you feel bad about it, your feelings derive from how you explained the event. And your ability to deal with the setback is influenced by the way you explained it. However reasonable your automatic explanation is, can you think of an even better explanation? If you can, it will change your feelings and your capabilities.

Also, those times when you don’t have the time or motivation to tackle your project, you can do some small thing that moves it forward, even a little, and that will do two things: It will improve your mood, and it will make the project a little less intimidating.

This question keeps you moving. It keeps you making progress.

One of Lakein’s techniques is to set a timer for five minutes, and work on your project until the time is up. Because it is so brief, you are not at all intimidated. Five minutes. You can stand just about anything for five measly minutes.

Often you’ll find that once your five minutes are up, you don’t really want to stop. But by giving yourself such a small goal to begin with, you are able to get something done. Without that technique, you would have gotten nothing done on that project.

And working on your project for even five minutes gets you thinking about it, which is usually a good thing.

We tend to think about projects as a whole. This question gets us thinking about doing smaller parts of the whole. Do you have a large project you’ve been putting off because it is such a large project and you don’t want to get started? Ponder this question. Can you do something on it for five minutes? Can you do a small part of it for now?

Chores and distractions, however, can easily absorb so much of your time that you never get around to doing something toward your goal. That’s frustrating, and it brings you down, which makes you less motivated to work on your goal. It makes you less motivated to do the one thing almost guaranteed to bring you up.

This question — what could you do to make some progress on your goal — focuses your attention on something that will make a difference to you right now and in the long run. It makes you feel better immediately to make progress on a goal. And the ultimate achievement of your goal will make a difference to you in the long run.

And all you need to do is make some progress. It’s not either you work for ten hours on your goal or you can’t do anything about it. You can almost always do something that will make some progress toward your goal, and a little is much better than nothing. The question is what could you do, not what would be the most ideal if everything were perfect. If you think of something and it would take three hours and you only have fifteen minutes, keep thinking. What could you do?

Try it right now. What could you do to make some progress on your most important goal?

“Then,” asked Amos, “where does experience come from?”

“From bad judgment,” answered the Kingfish.

There’s always something to learn from misfortune. And that’s what this article is about: Dealing with adversity and setbacks. Dealing with events you didn’t want to happen.

The Kingfish pointed out one way you can always look at a setback as a good thing: You can learn something from it. At the very least, you can learn how to avoid having the same setback twice. But if you use your imagination, you can do better than that. Before you even see how something turns out, you can find ways of looking at an event that would make you feel good about it, even when it is obviously bad.

I’ll give you some examples in a minute, but I want you to see that if a “bad” thing has already happened, there’s no point in thinking of it as bad. Thinking it’s bad doesn’t help you to correct the problem, if it can be corrected. And if it can’t be corrected, it still doesn’t help you to think of it as a bad thing. People can learn and remember just fine when they feel good. You don’t have to feel bad to learn from your mistakes. In fact, people tend to learn better in a positive frame of mind than a negative one.

So there is no good reason to ever hold onto the judgment of a situation or event in your life as bad, awful, terrible, tragic, unfortunate, or lousy. It doesn’t do you any good to consider an event that has already happened to be bad.

You can find a way to look at anything that happens to you as good, and people who are habitually successful and happy do exactly that. You notice I said “anything that happens to you.” If someone you loves dies, do not try to see it as good. You probably wouldn’t anyway, but this is a disclaimer to let you know I’m not a nut case. When something terrible happens to someone you care about, this question is probably not appropriate. The question is for events that happen to you personally.

Sometimes you’ll hear someone say, “I’m glad that terrible accident happened to me; it made me aware that my priorities were wrong.” And people who find meaning and value in even “bad” things in their lives are happier and more successful than those who just think it was a terrible misfortune.

And it’s not a matter of chance which way they look at it. It’s up to each person how they will look at their circumstances. We have the choice, and we will live with the feelings that spring out of the choices we make.

If we take the easy way and choose to look at a “bad” thing as bad, we will get the results of the easy way: Bad feelings. But if we use our heads with a little more vigor, if we make the effort to actively look for what’s good about it, if we choose to find a way to look at it as a positive thing, we will get the results of that choice too: It will be easier to wake up in the morning, we will be nicer to the people we love, we will take advantage of what we do have in our lives, and we will feel better in general.

You can ask yourself, How can I look at this as a good thing? Or you can simply assert to yourself, This is good! and then ask yourself why it’s good. Declare it’s good, and then allow your mind to find how you’re right. Either way works well.

Try it right now. Think of something in your life that you consider “bad.” It could be a condition you’ve lived with for some time, or something that happened recently you don’t like and wished hadn’t happened.

I’ll go along with you. I was a little curt with my sister-in-law, and now she’s not talking to me. Obviously that’s bad. Any idiot can see it’s bad. Only a starry-eyed goober would say that’s good. But I’m going to try to see what’s good about it. And come along with me, bringing the thing you think is bad with you. How can you look at it as a good thing?

How can I see it as good that I have this situation with my sister-in-law? Well, I can see right off the bat, I get to use it as an example in this article. Not only that, but it may be an opportunity to apply some of the other principles in my toolbox and might give me some good examples for those also.

How else? Hmm. Well, I really haven’t gotten to know my sister-in-law very well as of yet, mainly because we live in different cities. And I know that sometimes in working out a conflict, people get to know each other a lot better, and there’s no reason to think this won’t happen with us. I can see it as good because it is an opportunity for us to get to know each other better, and at a deeper, less superficial level.

How else can I look at it as a good thing?

What about you? Have you found ways to look at yours is a good thing? Be creative. Look at it from outside your own perspective. If a professor of psychology knew about your situation, assume she could see it as good. How would she explain her position to you?

If everything is easy, I have no opportunity to apply what I’ve learned. In applying what I’ve learned, I learn it better. In handling a difficult situation, I can take knowledge and turn it into skill. From this perspective, anything difficult is good. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill me makes me strong.” Although that statement isn’t strictly true, the attitude is a good perspective to adopt when difficulties come your way.

I tell you truthfully, if you make these principles a part of your thinking, you’ll be unsuppressible, unstoppable, and you will feel pretty good almost all the time. No kidding. The way you think makes a difference. And each principle is like another plug in the bottom of your bucket. Less and less of your happiness leaks out as more and more of these principles become a part of your thinking.

I know that some of them were a part of your thinking before you found PantsKicker.com, although you probably don’t have them worded exactly this way. I haven’t put in principles like “I can change my own life for the better” because you already think that way or you wouldn’t be reading this article. You already think in a healthier way than many people who wouldn’t bother looking at this site because they think “I’m just the way I am and I can never change.”

You also already know that even if you are doing better than most, you can always get better. And each new principle, repeated many times, is a solid step in that direction. This one (How can I look at this as a good thing?) is extremely useful.

This is a principle of thought. And thinking is most creative when it is a dialog — specifically, asking and answering questions. That’s how to do your most productive creative thinking: Ask yourself a question and then try to answer it.

For example, Sylvia has just been fired. She is on her way home from her ex-job. But she asks herself, almost with bitter sarcasm at first, “How can I look at this as a good thing?”

Sometimes when your body is filled with a negative emotion, a question like this won’t have a good effect right away. Don’t give up. Ask it again. And again.

“This isn’t a good thing,” thinks Sylvia, “not a good thing at all. ‘But how can I look at this as a good thing?’” She just needs to keep asking. She needs to awaken the part of her brain that answers questions.

And it is awake! “Maybe I’ll get a better job,” she says to herself without much conviction.

Ask it again! Keep asking the question. Sylvia does, and her mind turns more and more to the question, and it stops mulling her misfortune and stops moaning about how wronged she has been, and turns slowly toward the question. Then her mind kicks in and starts bringing up answers, slowly at first, and then faster and faster.

“There were a lot of things I didn’t like about that job. Now I have an opportunity to start over. It’s a good thing I got fired. I should have moved on from there long ago, but I guess I was just being lazy. This could be the best thing that could have happened to me. Maybe I should sit down and carefully decide what kind of job I want to get, and what kind of company I’d like to work for…”

And so on. Once the mind gets going, it can really come up with some good stuff.

Ask yourself: How can I look at this as a good thing? And keep asking.